Enabling Adaptation

Internet, mobility and move to cloud

Internet, mobility and clouds – the new sweet spot to throw numbers, potential and project growth.We often hear that in next 4-5 years, companies will generate 50% of Web sales via their social presence and mobile applications, 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices and 80% of businesses will support a workforce using tablets. Whether we touch upon these figures, only the future would tell. But the ‘presence’ is being felt and has been underscored in this seminar since morning.

As my distinguished panel members would dive in the details of how extactly some of the applications are panning out, I thought of sharing my views on two aspects which are surely in evidence – (a) emerging alternate channels of IT delivery and (b) potential of IT services from non-IT companies.

Emerging alternate channels of IT delivery.

We have well mastered the internal processes of acquiring IT asset, deploying and supporting it and finally retiring. We would now be needed to define and master use of alternative deploymentmodelsthat would be needed to manage delivery using software as a service (SaaS) and other cloud computing offerings so as to allow organizations to implement new applications quickly, with little upfront cost. We need to look from a longer term horizon as off-premises provisioning does not mean information infrastructure requirements go away. Hence we need to consider this alternative apart from the typical ‘build or buy’ model we are used to. And as we do this we would be needed to build our expertise to allow co-existence of cloud based applications and mobile applications with traditional IT assets and be closely integrated as well.

The biggest advantage the alternate channels would bring in would be “capacity on demand’ and a move towards ‘value based consumption’. This shift is needed as IT organizations become more responsive towards business. The shift would also, in an indirect manner, impact the energy consumed by the IT assets.

This model would get quickly tested in areas like email, web content management, contract management, CRM, construction project management and education. Logistics, hospitality verticals would be quicker to put this to test. Alternate models would be very attractive for the Government to quickly deploy some of the e-governance initiatives.

Potential of IT services from non-IT companies.

Gartner has predicted that by 2015, 20% of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers. As alternate delivery channels mature, businesses would understand the principle that cloud computing is a means to deliver ‘IT enabled capabilities’. Cloud computing would help enable services from non IT business houses and seen in some large retail organizations who are realizing that the their well hones supply chain competencies may be consumed as a service and act as an additional revenue source ! Distribution houses are also exploring similar services. Hence in a cloud-enabled world, logistics IT-enabled capabilities will be supplied directly by logistics companies, or supply-chain IT-enabled capabilities from organizations with supply chain competencies. This will be an acceleration of a trend that is already occurring in areas such as payroll management.

At a broader level, the IT industry as a whole will have to confront afundamentalre-assessment of what it means to be an IT provider. As non-IT players externalize core competencies via the cloud, they will be competing directly with IT organizations that have traditionally served in this capacity. And for IT organizations this would be yet another opportinity to redefine their value propositions as service enablers — either with consumption or provisions of cloud-based services.

So I guess we are living in interesting times where changes never cease to surprise us. So lets move forward with ‘enabling adaptation’ which incidentally is the tag line for our ADAPT Solutions.

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